Monthly Archives: August 2018

Monday, 1 October 2018 at 6pm

EIT Taradale
Lecture Theatre 2

Professor Maryanne Garry,
NZ Institute of Security and Crime Science,
University of Waikato

Admission: gold coin donation

The Trouble with Memory

Most people think memory is a faithful recorder and archiver of experience. But memory is a liar, a con artist, and a self-serving autobiographer. Memory causes trouble for us, and for others. Yet without memory, we couldn’t function, and our institutions would collapse. In this lecture, Professor Garry will present some of the science of memory, and talk about when and how memory causes trouble.

Maryanne Garry received her PhD in 1993 from the University of Connecticut, and did postdoctoral work at the University of Washington. In 1996 she moved to Victoria University of Wellington, where she worked for 20 years before taking up a joint appointment in 2016 at the University of Waikato, as a Professor of Psychology and a Professor in the New Zealand Institute for Security and Crime Science (one of only two in the world) at The University of Waikato.

She studies a puzzle of memory: how is that otherwise intelligent, rational people can remember things they never really saw, or experiences they never really had? Over the years, she has amassed a solid body of theoretically-grounded applied research that helps us shed light on the causes and consequences of these false memories. Her work has been funded by granting agencies in the US, Japan, and in New Zealand, where she has been awarded four Marsden grants from the Royal Society.

Stretching from the Hokitika River in Westland through to the Dunstan Range in Central Otago, the Pounamu terrane is a newly-identified component of the ancient Zealandia continent. Zealandia now is largely submerged (excepting the islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia), but it broke away from Australia and Antarctica between 85 and 60 million years ago.
Professor Cooper details how the Pounamu terrane is much younger than the adjoining components of New Zealand’s Eastern Province and formed after the original subduction zone, situated at the Chatham Rise, was blocked by collision of the Hikurangi Plateau approximately 105 million years ago. This collision ended a 200 million year phase of west-dipping subduction during which marine sediments scraped off the subducting oceanic crust were assembled to form the Eastern Province of New Zealand. The deeper levels of these off-scraped sediments were metamorphosed by extreme heat and pressure, producing the Haast Schist (dominated by Otago, Alpine and Marlborough schists).
However, new evidence suggests that a second subduction zone developed subsequently on the western margin of the South Island with off-scraped sediments, making up the Pounamu terrane, accumulating above an east-dipping subduction zone. Deep in the subduction zone, the Pounamu terrane underwent metamorphism at around 70 million years ago forming this younger component of the Alpine Schist.

Alan was educated in Burton-on-Trent and Sheffield, England. He came to New Zealand in 1966 as a Teaching Fellow to undertake PhD study at the University of Otago, under Professor Douglas Coombs. His thesis area was the Haast River, south Westland, where he investigated the structure and progressive metamorphism of greenschists and amphibolites in the Alpine Schist. In 1970, he was appointed a Lecturer at the University of Otago, from where he retired in 2012 after 46 years service.

Alan continues to do research work in the Southern Alps. Subjects of his research include: a lamprophyre-carbonatite dyke swarm intruding the schist (first documented by Julius von Haast); the Pounamu Ultramafics and correlative rocks; marine terrace remnants and uplifted Holocene sedimentary sequences; mapping of the Alpine Fault; anatectic pegmatites; ages of detrital zircons within the Alpine Schists. He has undertaken experimental work on carbonate minerals in Canada, and mapping of carbonatites in Antarctica, Namibia and Turkey. He has spent eight field seasons in Antarctica: supervising students and investigating the basement geology of the Transantarctic Mountains and the Neogene to Recent alkaline volcanic rocks of the Erebus Province of the McMurdo Volcanics.

The Hochstetter Lecture is named in honour of Ferdinand von Hochstetter and a speaker is chosen annually by the GeoScience Society of New Zealand. Hochstetter is known for the geological maps of the Auckland and Nelson areas produced in conjunction with colleague Julias Haast whilst on a scientific voyage in 1859.